Sunday, April 08, 2007

Food Rebellion

So I haven't talked about cooking around the house since the Christmas Party, and for good reason. The Lovely Bride is a tax preparer, an enrolled agent who is the manager of an office for a Large Tax Corporation (LTC). As a result, the period between January and April is a bit sticky as far as cooking. Making matters worse has been my own sudden upswing of activity at work as my company accelerates on Guild Wars: Eye of the North.

Not that we aren't cooking - we're just doing safe traditional recipes - pastas, stews, the occasional spinach pie. But just as often its a case where I'm reaching for the ramen noodles for a quick late bite, or the Lovely Bride comes home late and consumes the lunch that she packed and didn't have time to eat. We get out to eat at restaurants, but we haven't quite caught up to our anniversary dinner yet.

Anyway, there is a breaking point, and the Lovely Bride hit it last week, with the approach of Easter, which in her family, is a cooking holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My first warning was last Tuesday, when I came home and found that she had whipped up some swedish meatballs, a wonderful family recipe that, surprisingly, is in the recipes section of the Tales of the Inn of the Last Home Dragonlance book. (She wrote the cookbook section, and during the test section I ended up eating a lot of spiced potatoes). The meatballs were great, served on fettuccine, and I spent most of Wednesday thinking of them as leftovers, to find out that she had found time to deconstruct two dungeoness crabs and that my crab cakes were firming up in the fridge.

Thursday and Friday I was elsewhere for dinner, but Saturday I get home from the office (yeah, I'm working weekends right now) and she brightly turned to me and said "Good, you're home. I need help stuffing the kielbasa". This is not a sexual innuendo, but rather another family recipe that eventually found its way into the Dragonlance cookbook, and the two of us made pork sausage (yahknow, its impossible to talk about it without going into a 'bevis and butthead' moment - fine, go with it) with an electric sausage stuffer.

This morning, we had kielbasa and pancakes and strawberries for breakfast. A walk down Soos Creek in the middle of the day, and tonight, we're looking forward to a lobster gerwurtz with ginger, served on a bed of spinach.

Then she has to go hull-down for the last crunch, and we go back to leftovers and convenience food for a while.